Climate Change Is Increasingly a Factor When Americans Move. And Yet.....

Are Americans moving to places where climate change poses less of a risk? Some are. They don’t want to worry that rising sea levels are going to wash away their coastal home or that a wildfire will roar into their wooded western valley. Or they want to avoid triple-digit temperatures or water rationing.

“Millions and likely tens of millions of Americans” will move because of climate through the end of the century, Jesse Keenan, an associate professor of real estate at the Tulane University School of Architecture, told Yahoo News. “People move because of school districts, affordability, job opportunities. There are a lot of drivers, and I think it’s probably best to think about this as ‘climate is now one of those drivers.’”

Yet a surprising number of us are still heading to areas that face above-average threats. Census projections suggest the Southeast will see the nation’s largest population gains over the next two decades, despite the climate change-related risks that the region faces.

Joseph Von Nessen, a University of South Carolina economist, said that most of Southeast’s new residents are coming from New England. Many are retirees attracted by the region’s lower cost of living, mild winters and other charms. Younger workers are moving to the region as well, drawn by newly-created manufacturing jobs.

 The population of Charleston, S.C., grew 25 percent from 2010 to 2020. The city has approved plans for a 9,000-acre residential and commercial development that, environmental advocates say, would locate about half of its homes in a flood plain, Anna Phillips wrote in The Washington Post. From 1970 to 2020, Florida’s Cape Coral-Fort Myers area grew an astounding 623 percent, to more than 760,000 people.

 Can the insurance industry convince homeowners to choose wisely? “I’m very concerned,” New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas told The Associated Press, “that these natural disasters are either going to raise premiums or we’re going to be in a deeper crisis like Florida, where insurance providers don’t want to come to New Mexico because it’s a very challenging market to insure.” 

Some climate advocates fear that despite the hazards, newcomers to the Southeast may not be aware of the risks they’ll face. Realtors aren’t required to disclose the flood history of the properties they sell, and finding that information can be difficult, The Post’s Phillips reported. 

 “If every Realtor was required to tell people, ‘You should know over the period of your mortgage your home will flood at least once, maybe twice,’ I think people would go, 'Whoa, what?” said Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “But due to policy failures in state capitals and in Washington, we have made it extremely difficult for people to not only find that information but to even tell people about it.”

 The reality, sketched out in a report by the nonprofit research group Climate Central, is that hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in Louisiana, Texas, North Carolina, and Florida are in danger of being lost or severely damaged because of rising sea levels.

According to PBS, the report says that, in just 30 years, more than four million acres of land will be increasingly threatened by routine flooding. By 2100, over $100 billion worth of property could be in jeopardy as the coastlines of the U.S. continue to creep inland.

The most aggressive effort to persuade Americans to leave hurricane-threatened areas, The New York Times reported, may be a new program that prices federal flood insurance according to climate risk, dramatically increasing costs for people living in vulnerable places.

Another approach, now being tried by the Biden administration, will give three Native tribes $25 million each to move away from coastal areas or rivers. The three communities — two in Alaska, and one in Washington State — will move their key buildings onto higher ground and away from rising waters, with the expectation that homes will follow. The spending, The New York Times’ Christopher Flavelle explained, is meant to create a blueprint for the federal government to help other communities move away from vulnerable areas.

Help also may be coming from Congress. A bipartisan bill introduced by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) would strengthen federal investments in coastal restoration and resilience efforts by sending revenue generated from offshore wind back to coastal states and amending the revenue sharing program under the 2006 Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act. It was approved in July by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Known as the RISEE Act, S. 2130 has 20 cosponsors. It will need to be reintroduced in January. Please urge your senators to support it and encourage your House representative to cosponsor the House version (H.R. 9049).

Could Putin's war speed global decarbonization?

No one should be writing a thank you card to President Putin, but his invasion of Ukraine may end up accelerating the world’s transition to clean energy. That was the message from three international energy experts recently.

While some countries have been burning more fossil fuels such as coal in response to natural gas shortages caused by the war, wrote The New York Times’ Brad Plumer, “that effect is expected to be short-lived, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in its annual World Energy Outlook, a 524-page report that forecasts global energy trends to 2050… The agency now predicts that worldwide demand for every type of fossil fuel will peak in the near future.”

"Energy markets and policies have changed as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, not just for the time being, but for decades to come," said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol.

"The energy world is shifting dramatically before our eyes. Government responses around the world promise to make this a historic and definitive turning point towards a cleaner, more affordable and more secure energy system."

As Plumer explained, “Many countries have responded to soaring prices for fossil fuels this year by embracing wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear power plants, hydrogen fuels, electric vehicles and electric heat pumps. In the United States, Congress approved more than $370 billion in spending for such technologies under the recent Inflation Reduction Act.” 

Global clean energy investment is set to rise to more than $2 trillion a year by 2030, up by half from current levels, while "international energy markets undergo a profound reorientation in the 2020s as countries adjust to the rupture of Russia-Europe (energy) flows, the IEA said.

Global emissions of fossil fuels leading to climate change will peak by 2025, as coal use falls within the next several years, natural gas demand plateaus by 2030, and oil demand levels off in the middle of the next decade before falling.

"One of the effects of Russia’s actions is that the era of rapid growth in natural gas demand draws to a close," the IEA said, pointing to a rise in global demand for gas of less than five percent between last year and 2030.

Director-General Francesco La Camera of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) agrees with Birol. “In the mid- and long term, the Ukraine crisis will bring an acceleration to the energy transition because governments finally realize that going for renewables is not only good for the environment, jobs, GDP, but also good for ensuring higher energy independency," he said.

The head of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is singing from the same hymnal. "It's clear that this war in Ukraine will speed up our consumption of fossil energy and it's (also) speeding up this green transition," said Petteri Taalas, WMO’s secretary-general. "From a climate perspective, the war in Ukraine may be seen as a blessing," 

There are skeptics, though. At COP27, the research collaboration Climate Action Tracker asserted that nations scrambling this year to buy more natural gas to replace supplies from Russia are risking years of emissions that could thwart climate goals.

In any event, it behooves all countries and companies to press ahead with efforts to speed the transition from fossil fuels. That includes putting an honest price on carbon.

Offshore wind projects gaining momentum

The federal government is moving quickly to develop offshore wind farms along all three U.S. coasts. The Biden administration has set a goal to deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030, enough to power 10 million homes and cut 78 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

The latest news is a proposal for floating offshore wind projects along the Pacific Coast since California’s ocean waters are too deep for the fixed-bottom wind turbines that have been deployed off the Atlantic coast. 

The Interior Department plans to hold an offshore wind energy lease sale on December 6 for areas off central and Northern California. This will be the first offshore wind lease sale on the West Coast. The sale will include five lease areas totalling 373,268 acres. The large-scale projects that would be developed could one day generate more than 4.5 gigawatts of energy and power 1.5 million homes, the department said. By 2035, Interior aims to have 15 gigawatts of floating offshore wind capacity. 

The announcement, reported Nichola Groom of Reuters, “is the latest in a government push to put wind turbines along U.S. coastlines, creating a new domestic jobs engine.”

Jobs are also top of mind along the Gulf Coast, where the Biden administration is planning to conduct additional lease sales. Erik Milito, president of the National Ocean Industries Association, a trade group that represents both the offshore oil and wind industries, said, “Steel fabricators, heavy lift vessel operators, marine construction firms, subsea engineers, seismic surveyors, and a host of other jobs and businesses that are integral to Gulf of Mexico oil and gas development are also building out American offshore wind,” Milito said in an email to The Washington Post’s Maxine Joselow. “There is a reason the first U.S.-built offshore wind substation is being constructed in Ingleside, Texas.”

Most of the offshore wind activity has been in New England and farther down the Atlantic Coast. New York State now has five offshore wind projects in active development – the largest offshore wind pipeline in the nation, totaling more than 4,300 megawatts and representing nearly 50 percent of the capacity needed to meet New York’s nation-leading offshore wind goal of 9,000 megawatts by 2035. New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Maryland are among the other states moving forward to take advantage of their offshore winds.

President Biden has directed the Interior Department to pursue wind development off the coasts of Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, rescinding an executive order that President Donald Trump signed in 2020. Trump’s order banned all offshore energy development, including oil- and wind-power lease sales, in the southeast Atlantic.

Of course, there will be challenges in moving all these projects from the drawing boards. Some opponents of offshore turbines have asserted that they mar ocean scenery. That may not be an issue with the California proposals since the floating turbines would likely be more than 20 miles offshore. But, as The Wall Street Journal’s Katy Stech Ferek pointed out, “there are potential conflicts with the commercial fishing boats, the shipping industry, marine researchers, tourists and the U.S. military. Those include everything from worries about sea turtles and other marine life to obstacles such as shipping routes and underwater telecommunication cables.”

The nation’s first offshore wind project, off Block Island along the Rhode Island coast, started generating electricity in late 2016. With a boost from the Inflation Reduction Act’s incentives, the United States is now on the verge of a giant leap forward. That appears to be true internationally, as well. Offshore wind will account for 25 percent of global renewables investments in 2030, up from six percent in 2020, the consultancy Wood Mackenzie estimates.  

Human Health Continues to Suffer due to Climate Change

Tackling climate change is important for the health of the planet, right? Absolutely. But too few Americans make the connection between climate change and human health–and the financial toll of those health problems. The World Health Organization (WHO) calls climate change “the single biggest health threat facing humanity.”

Axios reported that the world faces “a climate change-fueled health crisis — from increased emergency department visits due to heatstroke, exacerbated asthma and even heart attacks to injuries and illness linked to severe storms,” such as Hurricane Ian.

Let’s start with extreme heat. You may recall that in the summer of 2021 Seattle hit 108 degrees, some 30 degrees above normal. About 600 additional people died over a week in Oregon and Washington. Writing in Time magazine, Dr. Sameed Khatana of the University of Pennsylvania reported that two recent studies of the contiguous U.S. found that from 2008 to 2017, between 13,000 and 20,000 adult deaths were linked to extreme heat.  

Climate change, Axios reported, has also been linked to increased risks for kidney disease, obesity and diabetes, injuries, the transmission of infectious diseases, some cancers and poorer mental health. “We are learning more and more that the combustion of fossil fuels is contributing to a massive epidemic of chronic disease around the world that dwarfs AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined,” said Gary Cohen, president and founder of Health Care Without Harm, a group that focuses on reducing health care's carbon footprint.

Wildfire is another growing threat related to climate change, especially in the West. Those fires kill a number of people, including firefighters, and they destroy homes and other buildings. But they also pollute the air. Researchers found a 27-fold increase over the past decade in the number of people experiencing an “extreme smoke day,” which is defined as air quality deemed unhealthy for all age groups. In 2020 alone, nearly 25 million people across the contiguous United States were affected by dangerous smoke, Mira Rojanasakul reported in The New York Times.

“We have been remarkably successful in cleaning up other sources of air pollution across the country, mainly due to regulation like the Clean Air Act,” said Marshall Burke, a co-author of the research and professor of earth system science at Stanford. “That success, especially in the West, has really stagnated. And in recent years this started to reverse.” 

The research, Rojanasakul wrote, indicates that wildfire smoke could be a leading cause of that reversal, wiping out most of the progress. Particulate pollution causes more than short-term irritation. It has been linked to chronic heart and lung conditions, as well to cognitive decline, depression and premature birth. 

Then there’s infectious disease. More than half of the infectious diseases known to affect humans are being aggravated by climate change, scientists reported recently in a study in the journal Nature Climate Change. The research found that illnesses like hepatitis, cholera, malaria, and hundreds of others were spreading faster, expanding in range, and becoming more severe because of climate-related events.

It’s not just transmission that’s increasing; climate change is also making it harder to fight off these diseases by reducing people’s health, immunity, and access to medical care, the researchers concluded. 

“The environment harbors dozens of other carriers of illnesses you’ve probably never heard of,” Zoya Teirstein wrote in Grist. They come from bugs, shellfish, and even soil. With global temperatures rising, well-known vector-borne illnesses are becoming more common, and other, lesser-known diseases are spreading into new areas.

These illnesses will “continue to tax our public health and medical care systems for years to come,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites they spread can cause joint pain, skin lesions, long-term memory problems — even death. 

Then there’s hunger. The number of people experiencing extreme hunger has more than doubled in some of the countries most vulnerable to climate change, Oxfam International said in a new report. Some 48 million people are now suffering from acute hunger, and nearly 18 million of those people are on the brink of starvation. Conflict remains the primary driver of hunger, but “the onslaught of climate disasters is now outpacing poor people’s ability to cope, pushing them deeper into severe hunger,” said Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International.

The report found a strong correlation between extreme weather and rising hunger in 10 climate hot spots, wrote Karina Tsui in The Washington Post. “Climate change is no longer a ticking bomb,” said Bucher. “It is exploding before our eyes.”.

These soaring costs are not included in the prices of fossil fuels. They are what economists call “external costs.” We believe that fossil fuel prices should include such costs. If Congress opted for an honest price by enacting a carbon fee, there would be stronger incentives to speed the transition to clean energy.

More sobering news from the Greenland ice sheet

The accelerating loss of Greenland’s ice sheet could raise sea levels much more than previously believed, according to a new study published in Nature Climate Change. 

In August four leaders from the Partnership for Responsible Growth visited Greenland, the world’s largest island, to learn more about the problem from scientists and other experts. “It is increasingly clear that flood events are likely to become even more severe and frequent,” said John Englander, a member of our Advisory Board and the founder and president of the Rising Seas Institute. He has authored two books on the subject and advocates what he terms “intelligent adaptation.”

Greenland is now the largest single ice-based contributor to global sea-level rise, surpassing contributions from both the larger Antarctic ice sheet and from mountain glaciers globally. Greenland lies in the Arctic, which is warming much faster than the rest of the world. 

To that end, about 3.3 percent of the ice sheet's total mass is likely to be lost without any further warming, according to the new study’s lead author, Jason Box of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. That would trigger nearly a foot of global sea-level rise. 

The figures are a global average for sea level rise. Some places farther away from Greenland would get more and places closer, like the U.S. East Coast, would get less.

Researchers told Axios the findings are conservative, both due to quirks in its methods and to the assumption that no further global warming will take place, which is a highly unlikely scenario. “It is a very conservative rock-bottom minimum,” Box asserted. “Realistically, we will see this figure more than double within this century.”

“In fact,” said PRG co-founder and CEO Bill Eacho, “the scientists we consulted in Greenland are quite certain that the sea level rise will be significantly greater than the 10.6 inches that this study projected just from Greenland.”

“Every study has bigger numbers than the last. It’s always faster than forecast,” said

William Colgan, a co-author who studies the ice sheet from its surface with his colleagues at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.

The major issue with the new study is the lack of a time horizon attached to the predictions, according to Sophie Nowicki, an ice sheet expert at the University at Buffalo who was not involved in the research. Do you get that number by 2100, she wrote in an email to The New York Times’ Elena Shao, “or in thousands and thousands of years?” 

The study’s authors “suggested much of it can play out between now & the year 2100,” wrote The Washington Post’s Chris Mooney. Englander added, “It’s impossible to precisely predict the rate of Greenland and Antarctic melting, but five to10 feet is now a realistic range for global mean sea level rise by end-of-century.”

“Obviously, the number of variables in sea level predictions is almost infinite,” noted PRG Advisory Board member Julia Nesheiwat, who also made the trip to Greenland. “How quickly will the world diversify its energy resources to lower Co2 emissions? How much will sea level & temperature rise as we move through the 21st Century? Can carbon capture have a significant impact?” A member of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, Dr. Nesheiwat has served in influential positions during the past four presidential administrations and as Florida’s first Chief Resilience Officer.

“It’s too bad we can’t send every member of Congress to Greenland,” observed PRG co-founder and chairman George Frampton, who directs the Climate Program at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center. “Seeing things with your own eyes drives home the depth of the problem. I believe more of those elected officials would see the value of an honest climate price and other measures to combat climate change.”